Putin's D-Day Diss

The D-Day invasion is sanctified in the collective memory of the West. Starting at dawn on June 6, 1944, 150,000 men braved withering German resistance to secure a foothold in Europe and hasten the defeat of Adolf Hitler. No one questions that interpretation today, or so you would think. But as U.S. and European leaders gather on the windswept beaches and bluffs of Normandy to commemorate the 70th anniversary of D-Day on Friday, one of the invited guests is likely to be … skeptical.

It’s no accident that he’s the same guy who’s causing a lot of fresh trouble in Europe today: Vladimir Putin.

We already know that the Russian leader has been revising the history of the Cold War to justify his annexation of Crimea and his claims to Ukraine—by suggesting, for example, that Ukraine was never really an independent country. What is less well known is that Putin and his acolytes have also depended on a flagrantly distorted history of World War II—or what is known in Moscow as the “Great Patriotic War”—to rally Russians to the Kremlin’s expansionist new policies.

Since Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, this new version of World War II has been turned into the spiritual backbone for Putin’s resurrection of Russian power. In the new mythology contained in textbooks and official histories, victory in World War II came mostly from the “flawless” and “selfless” actions of the heroic Red Army, which is portrayed as a model for the future in the region. Putin himself, asked recently about Ukraine's contributions to victory in World War II, replied bluntly: "The war was won mostly due to the human and industrial resources of Russia."

Today many Russians would agree with him. They have come to believe that D-Day was late and not militarily significant—and was driven mostly by fear that Stalin would "liberate" the rest of Europe on his own.

Early last month, Putin even signed a law that criminalizes the purposeful distortion of the Soviet Union’s actions during the war. Based on recent court actions, the law appears to be an effort to prevent Russian historians from portraying Stalin as a war criminal or blaming him for huge casualties, and from characterizing the USSR as an ally of Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war (all of which happen to be mostly true).

Gone as well is any realistic discussion of the moral compromises that marked the beginning of World War II, in particular the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or Hitler-Stalin) Pact of August 1939, which freed up Hitler to invade Poland. At that time, with Josef Stalin allied with the Nazi dictator, Soviet propaganda was portraying Germany as a friendly country.

Today, the Russian government officially acknowledges the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but it denies all interpretations that portray the USSR as an aggressor at any stage of the war. The joint German-Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk that marked the division of Poland on Sept. 22, 1939, was recently described by the minister of culture, Vladimir Medinsky, as “the withdrawal of German troops under the supervision of Soviet authorities.”

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It is true that Hitler might never have been defeated without the Red Army, which lost at least 11 million soldiers, compared to just under 300,000 fatalities on the American side. Obama himself, in a speech in Moscow in 2009, quoted John F. Kennedy as saying, “No nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War.” What is left out is that, once they stopped the German army at Stalingrad and began advancing, the Soviet forces ended up terrorizing much of Eastern Europe. This behavior, sanctioned initially by the Soviet commanders and even by Stalin personally, accounted for much of the suspicions, mistrust and resentment the Soviet Union faced when occupying large swathes of Europe during the Cold War. Long memories of this behavior in the last two years of the Second World War—followed by Moscow’s takeover of East Germany and invasions of Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968)—is still the basis for much of the deep mistrust Moscow faces in countries such as Poland and the Baltic states. It is also one reason why so many Ukrainians sought to join the EU and NATO why Georgia would still like to do so.

Peter Eltsov is a Washington-based political analyst and writer who has held positions at Harvard, Free University in Berlin, the Library of Congress and Wellesley College.

Klaus Larres is the Richard M Krasno Distinguished Professor of History and International Affairs at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.